02 June 2012

Tailored suits, chauffeured cars
Fine hotels and big cigars
Up for grabs, all for a price
Where the red hot girls keep on dancin' through the night
The tab is on the taxpayer
The sights are on you
So what do you do that's guaranteed?

Hey, fat Trumka and little Hoffa
You break the laws
You hustle, you deal, you steal from us all
Come on, come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk
Come on come on, lovin' for the money

Moneytalks
Your B.S. fucks
Moneytalks

...and we're gonna take you sons' of bitches out!

How much should you pay?

Tuesday's recall vote frames a question that confronts not only Wisconsinites, but all Americans

For partisans on the left, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
is the key issue in Tuesday's recall election. Liberals loathe him and
his smackdown of public employees unions. Through their prism, this
extraordinary election is the climax of last year's mass protests
against Walker in Madison's cruciform state Capitol.

For partisans on the right, the key issue is their sense that public
employees see themselves as privileged aristocrats, entitled to wages
and benefits well beyond what comparably skilled workers receive in the
private sector. Through this prism, Tuesday is about protecting a
governor who dared to challenge mighty unions.

Much news coverage focuses on
whether Walker's slim lead in opinion polls prophesies victory over
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
The vote on whether to recall Walker, a Republican, and replace him
with Barrett, a Democrat, is a do-over of the 2010 race in which Walker
beat Barrett by 6 percentage points.

For most Americans, though, this vote is less about the parochial matter
of who governs Wisconsin than it is about a question now raging coast
to coast: How much should recession-weary citizens be asked to pay for
how much government?

National polling continues to identify governments' spending and debt as
issues that animate a big share of the electorate. Politicians often
respond that Americans will change that tune when they see how budget
reductions slash services. Tuesday's election will inform that debate:
Voters will declare whether they do, or don't, regret electing an
aggressive cost-cutter as their chief executive.

Lost amid Walker-vs.-Barrett coverage is the dollar impact of changes that Walker and legislative Republicans
— several of whom also face recall elections — have delivered. No one
seriously disputes that those changes have, as Walker had predicted,
given Wisconsin governments and their taxpayers savings that are likely
to grow over time. His foes retort that any savings have come at the
cost of abusing public employees.

When Walker took office in 2011, Wisconsin faced a biennial deficit of
$3.6 billion. He responded with legislation that famously, if briefly,
drove Senate Democrats
to Illinois, lest majority Republicans have a quorum to pass it. Act
10, as it's known, became law and took effect last June 29. Among many
economizing provisions, it requires public workers to contribute about 6
percent of salary to their pensions, and pay about 12 percent of their
health insurance premiums.

What most enraged unions was Act 10's limitation of collective
bargaining for most workers — although not those in public safety — to
wage issues. This in the state that, in 1959, was the nation's first to
give collective bargaining rights to public employees. Organized labor
knew that restricting bargaining in Wisconsin would embolden officials
in other financially stressed states to do the same. Thus the decision:
Walker had to be recalled.

In April, 10 months into Act 10, Walker's office announced that his
policies already had saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $1 billion. The
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a detailed accounting, verifying more
than three-fourths of Walker's claim, with the rest — such as estimated
savings from changes to overtime and sick leave — not possible to
calculate.

But the big picture isn't lost on many Wisconsinites: By cutting
spending, limiting property tax hikes and freeing local governments from
some personnel costs, officials could trim spending without trashing
services. In fact, the savings have let governments avoid cuts they otherwise would have had to impose.

The Journal Sentinel analysis explored the impact of Walker-driven
changes in the Milwaukee suburb of Brown Deer: The local school district
is saving $1 million in pension contributions, health plan adjustments
such as increased co-pays, and changes in the workday. "We had many
teachers tell us, let's save everybody's job," said Brown Deer
Superintendent Deb Kerr. "We didn't cut programs. We didn't raise class
sizes. And we maintained our level of staffing."

Those positive effects help explain why Barrett, in his attacks on
Walker, doesn't dwell on collective bargaining — the issue that
energized those 2011 Capitol protests.

Other impacts of Act 10 undermine not just labor's warning that services
would suffer, but also the sheer size of its membership:

Eliminating
automatic collection of union dues exposed the willingness of many
workers to quit organized labor. The Wall Street Journal reports that public unions have had stark drops in membership — of more than half for the second-largest, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Membership in the AFSCME council representing state workers has plunged by two-thirds, from 22,300 to 7,100. And the American Federation of Teachers has lost 6,000 of its 17,000 members.

Oh, and that projected $3.6 billion state deficit? Wisconsin now expects a surplus of $150 million at the end of the biennium.

This saga of government savings, uninterrupted services and flagging
unions isn't what organizers of Tuesday's recall anticipated. And if
they topple Walker, national attention will pivot to Wisconsin's
implications for other races, including President Barack Obama's hope for re-election five months from now.

But for those who care as much about government as they do about
politics, Tuesday's vote will test whether the public's desire for
spending restraints is just talk — or a cry from the heart that
officials in other states had better heed.

Tailored suits, chauffeured cars
Fine hotels and big cigars
Up for grabs, all for a price
Where the red hot girls keep on dancin' through the night
The claim is on you
The sights are on me
So what do you do that's guaranteed
Hey little girl
You want it all
The furs, the diamonds, the painting on the wall
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk

A French maids, foreign chef
A big house, with king size bed
You had enough, you ship 'em out
The dollars up, down, you better buy the pound
The claim is on you
The sights are on me
So what do you do, that's guaranteed
Hey little girl
You break the laws
You hustle, you deal, you steal from us all
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk
Moneytalks

Moneytalks
B.S. Walks
Moneytalks

Come on come on
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk
Come on come on, lovin' for the money
Come on come on, listen to the Moneytalk

To save my steeple, I visited people;
for this I'd gone when I met Little John.
His name came, I understood,
when the judge said "You're a robbing hood."
He told me of his strange foundation,
conceived on sight of the Woodstock nation;
he'd had to hide his reputation.
When poor, 'twas salvation from door to door.
But now, with a pin-up guru every week,
it's Love, Peace & Truth Incorporated for all who seek.

The new ruins of Great Britain...invading armies unnecessary.

By Kyle Smith

2 June 2012

Don’t be fooled by the pomp and
dazzle of the Queen’s royal Diamond Jubilee flotilla easing past the
tourists, celebrity-spotters, and pickpockets on the Thames. Britain is a
country rotting from the inside, the first nation on earth that elected
to destroy its culture with political correctness.

Asks British columnist Rod Liddle, “Who are the people who have made
Britain what it is today, the ones who ensured that we became a
limp-wristed and decrepit, post-imperial satrapy of incompetence,
sanctimony, self-obsession and self-loathing?”

Who indeed? (By limp-wristed, Liddle means lacking in conviction, not gay). The short answer is the new aristocracy, the bien pensant, well-shod, culturally aloof types who watch the BBC, read The Guardian,
and vote to nudge the country ever farther along its current
trajectory, which has not even slightly been altered by the return of a
Conservative to the premiership. Against the wishes of the average
citizen, Britain has a government that is simultaneously abdicating its
core functions and pretending to take responsibility for other duties
for which it is spectacularly ill-suited. It has abandoned a proud,
concrete culture in pursuit of a hazy dream of a transnational ideal.
The people’s response has been to fume lightly and do nothing, because
they’re British and expect things to be bad and get worse.

A few days in London will quickly cure you of any notion that, for
instance, New York is a chaotic city. It only barely rated notice in
most of the media the other day when five of London’s 11 subway lines went down simultaneously
at rush hour due to signal failures and train breakdowns. It was about
80 degrees at the time and most trains have no air conditioning. Subway
unions are threatening a strike. And yet a glance at the national news
sources, which are obsessed with the massacres in Syria, the Jubilee,
the Olympics, and the never-ending Leveson Inquiry that vaguely promises
a sinister new truth czar will be empowered to decide in advance which
media stories can be published, turns up almost zero outrage at all of
this.

Don’t be fooled by the pomp of the Queen’s royal
Diamond Jubilee flotilla this weekend. Britain is a country rotting from
the inside.

The “respectable” media outlets don’t much bother with the latest outrages on the crime front, such as the fatal convenience-store stabbing that resulted in only a ten-year sentence for the assailant, who is expected to be free in four. Unleash a nutty racist tirade on the subway,
though, and you stand in contempt of that BBC-transnational ideal of a
multiculti wonderland. Judges will express no leniency whatsoever,
handing out five month sentences for the crime of… speaking.

So the government can’t make the trains run on time or make people
feel safe on the streets. (a friend who lived in New York for many years
tells me of how, after moving to London, he witnessed a stabbing,
called the police, and waited a number of minutes for them to arrive, by
which time the perpetrators were long gone. The nearest police station
was about 300 yards away, but the constabulary decided to send
representatives from a farther one instead, lest they risk crossing
paths with any violent criminals.)

Never let it be said the government is satisfied with this state of
affairs; no, instead, it is advancing into brand new areas of
incompetence. The prime minister has been boasting of his exciting plan
to literally head a nanny state as he sets up, for new parents, an
office to send texts, hold classes, and give “tiredness counseling.”
(For a play-by-play of Britain’s collapse, consult the blogger-columnist Peter Hitchens, who, ever since writing The Abolition of Britain over a decade ago, invariably takes the most pessimistic imaginable view of things and yet is rarely wrong.)

On the business side of things, a government-commissioned venture
capitalist’s report called for some obvious changes in labor regulations
that would make it easier to fire workers (and consequently make
businesses less leery of hiring in the first place). The left-wing,
Liberal Democrat “business minister,” whose relationship with his field
is much like that of an “infectious diseases specialist,” called the
plan “completely bonkers” and suffered no repercussions from his boss
whatsoever. The plan will gather dust. Another government minister,
Conservative William Hague, actually gave an interview in which he told
business to stop “complaining” and just hire. Currently, when a business wants to fire someone, it often has to justify the decision before a labor tribunal.
A proposed reform would substitute a sort of pre-settlement in which
the fired worker gets a cash payout instead of the right to endless
litigation.

From offshore, Britain finds itself in the absurd version of a V-2
attack, with almost weekly regulatory strafing coming in from the
European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. Britain, which
voted simply to join a common market in 1973 but never voted to be ruled
from the continent, is so used to such indignities as being told that
it must not deport al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Qatada and must furnish
prisoners with ballots, that even David Cameron’s Conservatives
generally respond by being loudly huffy and doing nothing. Cameron’s
latest solemn vow is that he will ignore the ECHR directive to give
votes to prisoners. We’ll see. If he is going to deny the ECHR the
sovereignty it plainly lacks, why doesn’t he go all the way?

Because he’s afraid of the BBC.

We joke about the “state media” in America, but in Britain by far the
leading media outlet is the BBC, which operates independently but is
effectively funded by a tax (a large one, more than you pay for HBO).
Awash in public funding, it does exactly what you’d think it would do:
attack competitors and promote a left-liberal worldview, for instance by
portraying anyone opposed to the grand European project as eccentric
and possibly demented. Now that Europe is imploding and Britons say, by a
51 to 28 margin, that they want to leave theEU,
the political-media complex is scrambling to prevent the issue from
ever coming to a vote (though if it does, the same complex will move
mountains to ensure the vote is the correct, transnational one). George
Osborne, the number two man in the Tory party, has actually suggested
that the solution to Europe is more Europe — fiscal and policy
integration, i.e., a superstate with its capital in Brussels and its
biggest source of power in Berlin. Britain would finally relinquish all
claim to authority over its own affairs and essentially cease to exist
as a political entity. What Hitler and Napoleon couldn’t do, the dull
Eurocrats and their silky-voiced, terribly respectable media
cheerleaders are intent on doing. But then again, Britain is already
dead, it just hasn’t been buried yet.

[Taken from a news story concerning two rival gangs fighting over East-End Protection rights and from the album, Selling England By The Pound.]

Along the Forest Road, there's hundreds of cars - luxury cars.
Each has got its load of convertible bars, cutlery cars - superscars!
For today is the day when they sort it out, sort it out,
'cos they disagree on a gangland boundary.
They disagree on a gangland boundary.

There's Willy Wright and his boys -
one helluva noise, that's Billy's boys!
With fully-fashioned mugs, that's Little John's thugs,
the Barking Slugs - supersmugs!
For today is the day when they sort it out, sort it out,
yes these Christian soldiers fight to protect the poor.
East end heroes got to score in...

The Battle of Epping Forest,
yes it's the Battle of Epping Forest,
right outside your door.
You ain't seen nothing like it.
No, you ain't seen nothing like it,
not since the Civil War.

Coming over the hill are the boys of Bill,
and Johnny's lads stand very still.
With the thumpire's shout, they all start to clout
- there's no guns in this gentleman's bout.
Georgie moves in on the outside left
with a chain flying round his head;
and Harold Demure, from Art Literature,
nips up the nearest tree.
(Here come the cavalry!)

Amidst the battle roar,
accountants keep the score: 10-4.
They've never been alone, after getting a radiophone.
The bluebells are ringing for Sweetmeal Sam, real ham,
handing out bread and jam just like any picnic.

It's 5-4 on William Wright; he made his pile on Derby night.
When Billy was a kid, walking the streets,
the other kids hid - so they did!
And now, after working hard in security trade, he's got it made.
The shops that need aid are those that haven't paid.

"I do my double-show quick!" said Mick the Prick, fresh out the nick.
"I sell cheap holiday. The minute they leave,
then a visit I pay - and does it pay!"
And his friend, Liquid Len by name,
of Wine, Women and Wandsworth fame,
said "I'm breaking the legs of the bastard that got me framed!"

They called me the Reverend when I entered the Church unstained;
my employers have changed but the name has remained.
It all began when I went on a tour,
hoping to find some furniture.
I followed a sign - it said "Beautiful Chest".
It led to a lady who showed me her best.
She was taken by surprise when I quickly closed my eyes.
So she rang the bell, and quick as hell
Bob the Nob came out on his job
to see what the trouble was.
"Louise, is the Reverend hard to please?"
"You're telling me!"
"Perhaps, sir, if it's not too late.
we could interest you in our old-fashioned Staffordshire plate?"
"Oh no, not me, I'm a man of repute."
But the Devil caught hold of my soul and a voice called out "Shoot!"

To save my steeple, I visited people;
for this I'd gone when I met Little John.
His name came, I understood,
when the judge said "You're a robbing hood."
He told me of his strange foundation,
conceived on sight of the Woodstock nation;
he'd had to hide his reputation.
When poor, 'twas salvation from door to door.
But now, with a pin-up guru every week,
it's Love, Peace & Truth Incorporated for all who seek.

He employed me as a karma-ma-mechanic, with overall charms.
His hands were then fit to receive, receive alms.
That's why we're in

the Battle of Epping Forest,
yes it's the Battle of Epping Forest,
right outside your door.
We guard your souls for peanuts,
and we guard your shops and houses
for just a little more.

In with a left hook is the Bethnal Green Butcher,
but he's countered on the right by Mick's chain-gang fight,
and Liquid Len, with his smashed bottle men,
is lobbing Bob the Nob across the gob.
With his kisser in a mess, Bob seems under stress,
but Jones the Jug hits Len right in the mug;
and Harold Demure, who's still not quite sure,
fires acorns from out of his sling.
(Here come the cavalry!)

Up, up above the crowd,
inside their Silver Cloud, done proud,
the bold and brazen brass, seen darkly through the glass.
The butler's got jam on his Rolls; Roy doles out the lot,
with tea from a silver pot just like any picnic.

Along the Forest Road, it's the end of the day
and the Clouds roll away.
Each has got its load - they'll come out for the count
at the break-in of day.
When the limos return for their final review, it's all thru'
- all they can see is the morning goo.
"There's no-one left alive - must be draw."
So the Blackcap Barons toss a coin to settle the score.

You come on with it, come on
You don't fight fair
That's okay, see if I care
Knock me down, it's all in vain
I get right back on my feet again

Hit me with your best shot
Why don't you hit me with your best shot
Hit me with your best shot
Fire away

Well you're a real tough cookie with a long history
Of breaking little hearts like the one in me
Before I put another notch in my lipstick case
You better make sure you put me in my place

In 2007, 390,000 tax filers reported
adjusted gross income of $1 million or more and paid $309 billion in taxes. In
2009, there were only 237,000 such filers, a decline of 39%. Almost four of
10 millionaires vanished in two years, and the total taxes they paid in 2009
declined to $178 billion, a drop of 42%.

Oh, the Class Warriors, Obama Firsters, Socialists, and OWSers (but I continue to repeat myself) must be in absolute heaven!
Right? I mean, they hate the rich. So, now, there's 39% fewer of them.

There's also a 42% drop in taxes paid, but who cares? As President SCoaMF says, fairness is more important.

And, I almost forgot...

Corporate profits for the Q1 were the lowest that they have been in THREE YEARS!!! Another Obama success story!

Join me. Go Galt. Beat these bastards down until they are literally begging for you to help them.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?

By MARK STEYN
Published under the title "U.S., Europe on different paths to same place"

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn't get a lot of attention in the
United States, but on the Continent it's long been seen as the perfect
Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype
pan-European institution and predicated on the same assumptions.
Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and
Debussy, and in return gave us "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" (winner, 1969),
"Ding-Ding-A-Dong" (winner, 1975) and "Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley" (winner,
1984). The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them
to create the "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" of currencies.

Sophie Fact: When Sarkozy wanted to raise the number of hours in the work week from 35 to 40, the entire country went on strike. It wasn't always that way. In 1970, the French actually worked 10% more hours than Americans. What happened? As the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Edward C. Prescott, has pointed out: Taxes have risen sharply since 1970 and higher taxes give
workers less of an incentive to work extra hours.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in
Zagreb: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," cooed the hostess,
Helga Vlahović. "The string section and the wood section all sit
together." Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically
cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through
the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their
genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a
sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV's head
of "war information" programming.

Sophie Fact: Swedes work the longest years in Europe with an average 40.1 years. Hungarians have the shortest working lives with less than 30 years on the job. The average American works 45 years. All of us -- especially our totally pissed off children and grandchildren, who will hate us for what we've done to them -- are going to have to work a lot longer.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is
very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind
players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting
for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week's
Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that
the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the
competition "because the cash-strapped country can't afford to host the
lavish event next year," as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a
land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and
two-thirds of the country's airports are under threat of closure and
whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention
to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the
pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a
poignant symbol of how total is Spain's implosion. Ask not for whom
"Ding-Ding-A-Dong" dings, it dings for thee.

Sophie Fact: Both Spain and Greece have fertility rates of around 1.45. For a country just to maintain its population, it needs a fertility rate of 2.3.

One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the
complacent assumption that what's happening is "cyclical" – a downturn
that will eventually correct itself – rather than profoundly structural.
Francine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki
on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks
are a race of tax evaders. She's right. Compared to Germans, your
average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But
that's easy for her to say: Mme Lagarde's half-million-dollar
remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new
transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke
European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors, like the French,
or incompetent ones, like the Greeks, is relatively peripheral.

Sophie Fact: One-third of Greece's economy before the crisis was carried out "under the table" or "off-the-books."

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students,
who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently
striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven
years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade
macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to
a couple of sips: If you're wondering how guys who don't do any work
can withdraw their labor, well, "strike" is a euphemism for riot. The
other week, Vanessa L'Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du
Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway
system and bringing the city's morning commute to a halt. But, as in
Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor's in
sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through
the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

Sophie Fact: In Germany, the retirement age is 67 and retirees receive 46% of their final salaries as a pension.

In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different
but only to this extent: They've wound up taking separate paths to the
same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common
currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative
easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your
final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death
panels, whether higher education is just another stage of
cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars' worth of
personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic
citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany,
California or Quebec.

Sophie Fact: In Greece, men can retire at 55 and women at 50...unless they work in arduous and dangerous professions like television presenting, hairdressing or radio announcing, then they can retire at 45. Retirees receive 97% of their final salaries.

That's to say, the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or
subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the
assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western
democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to
earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of
human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world.
Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you
worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been
chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence"
that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a
desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till
you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health
insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced
something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has
led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend
the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long
holiday weekend.

Sophie Fact: In Italy, a parent can be ordered by a court to pay his 32 year-old daughter an allowance and 85% of Italian "men" between the ages of 18 and 33 live with mama (this was pre-crizioso!) Bamboccioni!

The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life,
and it's been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it
has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life
cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying
ever longer in "school" (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later
workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which
means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid
by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek
grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by
100 Greeks? No wonder they'd rather stick it to the Germans. But the
thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans
resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely
42 Germans will be able to do it?

Sophie Fact:Average government spending by EU nations today stands at approximately
49.2% of GDP — v. 44.8% in 2000.

Look around you. The late 20th century Western lifestyle isn't going
to be around much longer. In a few years' time, our children will look
at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away
their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that
came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in
the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that
vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying
what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely
varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

Sophie Fact: In 2011, 23 of the 27 nations
in the EU increased spending. This year, 24 of 27 will do so. In 2011, the United States increased spending. In 2012, it will do so again.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her
central metaphor all those years ago wasn't wrong. Any functioning
society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's
always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the
Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same
recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till
we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who
thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the
basic human life cycle.

On 15 December 1977, The Who performed before a select invited audience at the Gaumont State Theatre in Kilburn, North London, to record a concert for the film, The Kids Are Alright. It was the second-to-last performance for Keith Moon.

My lord, when will they ever learn it, ooh
Look there, nations of travelling children
Nowhere to go to escape the chill wind

Teenage Wasteland has a piper to pay one day....unless you stay wasted on unicorn dust like Obama and The Ferret.

"We're all flat-busted Keynesians now."

By William Tucker on 6.1.12 @ 6:09AM

The national debt, that is -- no matter how often Paul Krugman
tells you otherwise.

Since the incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr., has already
dealt with this subject in 1958, I defer to his inimitable style in
introducing the subject of today's column:

"Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New
Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern
over the national debt.… Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked
himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at
a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended
to think of as grown to menacing size.… And then, suddenly, the
academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length
and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt
introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung
their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political
consequences of Lord Keynes's discovery, the wry cartoonist of the
Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the
center, sitting on a throne in front of a maypole, was a jubilant
FDR, cigarette tilted up almost vertically, a grin on his face that
stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands
clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the
braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical
incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: "We owe
it to ourselves."

With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the
problem of deficit spending…. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect
and elect…"

After being pinned to the wall in such eloquent fashion like a
rare butterfly, you would think the conceit that "We owe the
national debt to ourselves" would have been long retired to some
museum of rhetorical antiquities. But no, we find that even today
the doctrine is still vigorously alive, at least in the mind of
Paul Krugman, the lunatic columnist of the New York Times
who has just published another 300-page volume that can be digested
into three words: "Spend, spend, spend" -- the government, that
is.

I admit I stopped reading Krugman a long time ago. You can only
listen to a one-track mind for so long before it loses any further
informational value. It all reminds me of the scene in Woody
Allen's Take the Money and Run where Virgil Starkwell, the
inept career bank robber, drops a rock on the foot of a prison
guard and is "locked in solitary confinement for a week with an
insurance salesman" whom we last see disappearing into the hole
with Woody propounding, "Now you're gonna need life. I think term
would be best. Then we're going to want to cover you for
accidents.…" That's what Paul Krugman sounds like.

Fortunately, the New York Post's Kyle Smith has stuck
his head into the maelstrom and reports in his Sunday column last week what Krugman is up to
these days. Wouldn't you know, he finds the Nobel Laureate still
flogging that same 1930s horse:

"People think of debt's role in the economy as if it were the
same as what debt means for an individual: There's a lot of money
you have to pay to someone else. But that's all wrong; the debt we
create is basically money we owe to ourselves, and the burden it
imposes does not involve a real transfer of resources."

In actuality, "We owe it to ourselves" is one of those deceiving
little pieces of rhetoric whereby liberals put their arm around
your and pat you on the back while picking your pocket. Let's try
an illustration. Imagine for a moment that you have taken out a
30-year mortgage on a house and owe the bank $300,000. Two years
into your payments you lose some of your income and start falling
behind. After three months the bank sends you a note saying that if
the situation isn't straightened out within another three months,
they may have to foreclose.

Do you think it would be possible to go into the vice
president's office, put your arm around his shoulder and say,
"Look, what's the difference whether I pay you or not? I mean, we
owe it to ourselves, don't we?"

We don't owe the national debt to ourselves. Some of us owe it
to others. Those who owe are generally called "wage earners,"
"taxpayers," or "U.S. citizens." Those who are owed are called
"lenders" and "bondholders." Now there may be some taxpayers who
are also bondholders and bondholders who are also U.S. citizens,
but the two groups are not identical. Reneging on any of the debt
will produce an unequal outcome -- what Krugman would call a "real
transfer of resources."

Look at it another way. A second class of stakeholders in this
game is government employees who have a claim on pension rights
that stretch far, far into the future. When the day comes -- and it
may not be long -- that governments find they are having difficulty
in meeting these obligations, will it be possible for them to brush
off pensioners by saying, "Look, you don't really need a check
right now. I mean, we'd just be paying ourselves, right?"

The problem here is that modern governments are run by people
who can't make these kinds of calculations. This is especially true
of the populists who congregate in the Democratic Party. Even the
brightest of them see government as an entity above ordinary
morality. In an article last week, for instance, USA Today
revealed that the true size of the national debt is not the
$16,000 per household that registers on the "Deficit Clock" but
$42,000 per household -- very near the average household income of
$49,000. This is because, contrary to the rules that govern private
companies and state and local governments, Congress does not
require itself to include future health and retirement commitments
on its books. That's enough to take $3.7 trillion off the annual
shortfall, chopping it from $5 trillion to $1.7 trillion.

What was really scary, however, was the comment of one Jim
Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He told USA Today
that "retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit
because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by
cutting benefits or lifting taxes." Did you get that? We can ignore
future commitments to Medicare and Social Security because -- what
the heck -- we can always just cut benefits or raise tax rates to
something like 90 percent. All that will be required is the
"political will." Even liberals who can add and subtract generally
don't have the nerve to confront what they're doing.

The national debt is not owed "to ourselves." It is owed to
bondholders who have loaned money on the understanding that they
are going to be paid back. Even Democrats in the highest positions
often have trouble grasping this reality. During the early days of
the Clinton Administration, when the new President was being told
he couldn't borrow heedlessly to stimulate the economy, James
Carville became famous for complaining, "I used to think that if
there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or
the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come
back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." Apparently
it never occurred to Carville that there are real people out there
buying those bonds.

The bond market is not an abstraction. It is a group
of people who have loaned money to the government. As
creditors, they are acutely aware of the unspoken words at the end
of "We owe it to ourselves," which are, "We owe it to ourselves,
therefore we really don't have to worry about paying it
back."

Now of course we're a long way away from not paying anything
back. As long as there is trouble in the world, as long as the
stock market remains remain uncertain, as long as real estate is
risky, as long as the full faith and credit of Tanzania or Portugal
is open to question, there will investors eager to snap up U.S.
Treasury Bonds. In fact with things falling apart among all those
Eurozone countries who only "owe it to themselves," interest rates
on 30-year Treasuries are at their lowest rate in decades. But
let's look 30 years out to a time when some of those commitments
will be coming due.

In 1938 or even 1978, it might still have been possible to argue
"We owe it to ourselves." Most bond holders were U.S. citizens who
could always be stiff-armed because "their loss is our loss." But
that is no longer true. About 30 percent of the $16 trillion U.S.
debt is now owned by foreigners. The Chinese government is the
third largest creditor, behind the Federal Reserve and the Social
Security Trust Fund, owning 8 percent of the total. The Chinese now
hold more than all U.S. households combined. Japan, the UK, Brazil,
Taiwan, and Hong Kong are also big lenders. Foreigners now own more
than half the debt not held by some division of the U.S.
government. If the debt continues to pile up at a rate of more than
$1 trillion a year, paying it off will involve a "real transfer of
resources."

Yet as Greece is demonstrating now, the system won't fall apart
because we can't pay our debts. It will eventually fall apart but
because we won't be able to go on borrowing to maintain
our standard of living. The crisis will come to a
head when investors decide to they don't want to lend anymore. Then
it will be impossible to meet day-to-day expenses. If a left-wing
government takes control of Greece this month and renounces its
obligations, Greece with not have enough money way to pay the
hundreds of thousands of government employees and pensioners who
receive a check each month. That's when
"We're-all-in-this-together" finally bites back.

Now all this probably isn't going to be enough to convince Paul
Krugman that government deficits have real consequences. But I'll
tell you what. Next time you read one of his columns saying how
spending borrowed money is the only way to end a recession, drop
him a note saying the following:

"Hey Paul, I'm having a little trouble paying the rent this
month. Do you think you could loan me a couple of thousand dollars?
It'll carry me over and maybe in a while things will get better.
And as far as paying you back -- well, look, we're all in this
together, right? We'll owe it to ourselves."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sophie:

I've
got to admit that I love when The Ferret talks about cause-and-effect. It
is like falling down the rabbithole. According to The Ferret, Austerity, which actually means tax
hikes like those that he and Obama have been championing NOW and
spending cuts DOWN THE ROAD, is the cause of the sovereign debt
crisis. Got that? Austerity caused the sovereign debt crisis.
In my alternate universe known as Realville, sovereign debt caused the
sovereign debt crisis. But, then again, what do I know? I'm not a Nobel
Laureate like The Ferret, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Fat Al
Bore, Barack Obama, or Dr Rajenda Pachauri, author of the enviro-smutty, bodice-ripping,
shag-fest of a GaianPussyGalore book known as “Return to Almora”- to be clear, he won the Peace Prize,not the Piece Prize or
a prize for literature.

I am so sick of The Ferret and his fellow Krugnuts. They act as though
we can just print away the debt. How’d that work out for the Weimar
Republic? It was great for Hitler, but not so well for the Jews,
regular Germans, Russians, rest of Europe, and Americans.

Yes, the US is currently a refuge from the turmoil in
Europe. Greece got downgraded again to CA2, which is just a couple of
notches above the Nigerian that emails you saying, “Send me all of your
financial information and banking data and I will send you a Bank of
Nigeria bond that is rated AAA++++ for only $10. In 6 months, we
promise to pay you back in full plus $2 trillion in interest.”

JUST BECAUSE WE ARE A REFUGE NOW DOESN’T MEAN WE WILL ALWAYS BE.

People — especially those on the left — look back to the 1950s and
pine for the days of 91% tax rates (less than 200 people ever paid those
rates), low unemployment (but not the 3 recessions they forget),
good-paying jobs that meant mum could stay home (that was before the
Great Society started paying women to get pregnant and stay single AND
the womyn’s rights movement that told women that staying at home was for
losers), low crime (shame and punishment meant something then),
families (men were men and not pussified versions of what Naomi Wolf
thinks they should be in earthtones, women didn’t get tramp stamps,
little boys didn’t wear dresses), etc.

What they forget is that WE REALLY WERE THE ONLY GAME IN GLOBALTOWN.
Europe was destroyed. Japan was destroyed. The Soviet Union was on
something like its 6th of 17 5-year plans. China was a closed, agrarian
society. Brasil and India were impoverished backwaters. WE HAD NO COMPETITION. THOSE DAYS ENDED AROUND THE LATE 1970S-EARLY 1980S.
Imagining that the United States will always remain the securest
place to park your money…the refuge of last resort, the shining city on
the hill…is just insanity. As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never
more than one generation away from extinction.” The same can be said
about global leadership, economic competitiveness, financial security,
dollar stability, individual property rights, etc.

Baba O'Riley (Teenage Wasteland) by The Who

Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven

My kids ain't gonna break my heart
My greed ain't gonna spoil their part
This life just has to be a new one
I'm gonna tan underneath a new sun

Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland

Don't have the latest suit, the long grass is my fruit
I am really ordinary man
The family is free to do just as they please
And we all sleep together in the caravan

Hey you, don't walk on the turnips
My lord, when will they ever learn it, ooh
Look there, nations of travelling children
Nowhere to go to escape the chill wind

Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland

My kids ain't gonna break my heart
And my greed ain't gonna spoil their part
This life just has to be a new one
I'm gonna tan underneath a new sun

Sally, take my hand
We'll travel south crossland
Put out the fire
And don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together
Before we get much older